Eric Schmidt has long been a believer in building. The former Google CEO is not merely watching artificial intelligence from the sidelines, he is actively investing in its future, warning of its dangers, and, to many, laying the groundwork for a profound shift in the human condition. In a recent discussion pegged to his latest co-authored book The Age of AI and Our Human Future, Schmidt laid out the contours of a world where humanity may no longer sit at the top of the food chain.
The conversation, however, was brought to life by a surprisingly domestic metaphor. “Let’s say I want to build a house,” Schmidt said. “Today, that involves land research, price negotiation, permits, architectural plans, hiring contractors and monitoring progress.” In the coming year, he argued, every one of those steps could be done by AI agents. “Each one of those is an agent,” he said. From analysing building codes to selecting a contractor and verifying work through photo analysis, intelligent systems could soon orchestrate an entire home build with minimal human intervention. That isn’t science fiction, Schmidt insists. It’s next year.
Schmidt’s remarks became more personal when he spoke of a recent trip to India, where he met young founders working on AI tools for small businesses. One app, built by two Indian developers, takes photographs of inventory to generate automated business intelligence. With no technical expertise, a small shopkeeper can receive insights on what is selling, what to reorder, and how to market products over WhatsApp. “All of this comes from a command: ‘Study my business and make me more money,’” Schmidt said. It was a real-world example of agentic AI designed not for Silicon Valley, but for the average merchant in a developing economy.
“We’re trying to capture all the benefits of AI while maintaining human values and dignity,” he said. That might seem optimistic, even benign. But then he added, “There’s a scenario where we are the dogs to the AI human equivalents.”
It is not merely metaphor. Schmidt believes that the rise of general-purpose AI agents with reasoning ability and memory will change every workplace, political system, and corner shop in ways that are coming “much faster than governments understand.”
Schmidt’s intervention comes with some weight. He has held roles at the highest levels of government and business, serving on the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, advising the Pentagon, and funding hundreds of scientific research projects. Much of his current work is based on a simple observation: science, when paired with computational power, becomes supercharged. “Science changes not by faculty members but by graduate students,” he quipped. “You fund enough of them with AI tools and the whole research game changes.”
One team he funds claims it could find all human druggable targets in under two years, if given more compute. It’s a staggering possibility. Schmidt calls such breakthroughs “profound” but is quick to add: “We’ll see.”
Still, the spectre of displacement looms. Schmidt insists that AI will first automate the dull and the dangerous. “Automation takes away the jobs that are the least human,” he said, dismissing fears of mass professional obsolescence as misdirected. Lawyers may sue more, doctors may treat twice as many patients, and journalists may publish double. The more interesting question is: what happens when a 12-year-old’s best friend is not human?
That, Schmidt warned, is not hypothetical. “What happens when that thing discovers things we don’t understand?” he asked. To illustrate the stakes, he recalled his late collaborator, Henry Kissinger, who until the end of his life was obsessed with perception and power. “He was convinced that Google was a threat to civilisation,” Schmidt recounted. That warning has shifted now from search engines to agents.
Next year, according to Schmidt, will belong to AI agents, long context windows and automatic programming. Each business function, from onboarding to accounting, will be broken into a network of AI-powered agents working in tandem, some reasoning, others learning from each interaction. Schmidt described how AI can now plan house construction from land purchase to contractor monitoring, even checking building progress via photo analysis.
“Every one of those is an agent,” he said. “They’re beginning to reason. Am I scaring you enough?”
Schmidt has no illusions about the scale of the geopolitical contest this unleashes. “It’s going to be a US–China race,” he said. “No other country can match China’s combination of focus, funding, and execution.” He sees Europe as hamstrung by bureaucracy and weak regulation. “They’re not growing, and they’re not organised around innovation,” he remarked bluntly.
As for the rest of the world, he was less hopeful. “AI does not redistribute prosperity by default,” Schmidt said. “It rewards scale and speed. The global south is not ready.” India, he said, might be an exception thanks to its education system and diaspora, but Africa and many agrarian economies may simply be overwhelmed.
He warned that democracies depend on growth to remain viable. Without it, redistribution becomes politically impossible. “Autocracies can survive without growth, but democracies cannot,” he said. “And AI, if anything, is about speeding up growth for those who already have the tools.”
When asked what the US government should do, Schmidt’s list was long but direct. He called for more funding for universities, streamlined high-skill immigration, and stronger industrial partnerships. “The dumbest thing we do,” he said, “is take a math PhD and deport them.”
As for sceptics who claim the hype is overblown, Schmidt barely flinched. “At the moment they’re wrong. It’s underhyped.” He pointed to ChatGPT’s 320 million users and $10 billion in revenue, just two years after launch. “That kind of adoption is not a bubble. It’s a signal.”
He offered one final warning. The day AI agents begin speaking in a language we can’t understand, “unplug them,” he said. “You won’t know what they’re doing.”
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